At present Artificial Intelligence (AI) is considered both a miracle cure for much of what ails our society by a few, and viewed by others as an evil technology just waiting to take over and destroy us. It is neither, just another innovation in the millennias-long ladder of ‘machinery’ that humankind has invented for its convenience, an innovation that will change our cultures, societies, and lives for both good and bad, as every step before it has. The way to look at AI is not as a new development, but as only one more step in a ladder humankind has been climbing for centuries.
We have been developing machines to replace what we have to do ourselves since before the Bronze age, when hunter gatherers, finally starting to settle in one place and put down roots, built the first crude ‘water systems’ – just stone or baked clay channels and cisterns to divert water sources, and eventually learned to dig wells and build aqueducts, so they did not have to carry water and could have bigger and more reliable sources of the life-giving fluid. Later on, progressively and slowly, we learned how to control combustion, and mechanical forces, and eventually harness both to provide steam, gasoline, and rocket power, always to build machines to do automatically, and better, something we had done for centuries with our own labor. Viewed this way, AI is just another step, and not the first using digital computers, which began by doing arithmetic for us, then keeping records and making documents and then maps, then keeping and building complex multi-aspect databases, and now, doing a type of commodity thinking for us.
At every step, when a new innovation level was reached, exactly the same things happened;
- We did much more of whatever it was: get and move water (water systems), travel ourselves (cars, airplanes), move crops and products (trucks, ships, planes), communicate and entertain ourselves (radio, TV, recorders, the internet), and now think. We always did much, much more, not two times or even ten times but orders of magnitude more.
- We use much more energy doing it than we consumed before. (Look at automobiles and transportation overall).
- We find new and different uses for the innovation and it has impacts we never expected. Cars are a very good example. They led to suburbs – we had few before them and all the good and bad social problems they cause, local pollution problems (which innovation mostly solved) and eventually so much pollution it poisons the planet’s climate (but don’t worry too much, there is a solution we can build, as one will see in COPO).
- We deal with it: the good and bad, and things change.
- But humans don’t change, a very important aspect of the stories I tell.
So, it will be with Artificial Intelligence. My own belief is that the current types of AI, both natural-language processes and all manner of adaptive systems, will replace what can be called commodity thinking – the application and use of procedural, rule-based knowledge about how to do something, but not necessarily be truly creative or make critical decisions. AI’s current ‘area of expertise’ is most easily thought of as what ‘non-comms’ in the military do, as seen in my books, where, several centuries from now, AI has replaced the six-hundred non-comms on what is basically a WWII light cruiser, leaving only the officers to be human.
Among other things (hopefully others find those things exciting and entertaining!) my books explore what we may be able to do with AI if we push it, into new areas and approaches far different that what is used today. Was Roger Penrose correct (The Emperor’s New Mind), that algorithmic methods like we use today will never produce true conscious intelligence, or is there a way to make non-algorithmic methods work, something far beyond what current approaches can do? Can we make a ‘synthetic human’ mind? If so, would it have a soul?